- It has a way of keeping the professional media providers and traditional publishers honest (as it buries their work in a landslide of user-produced content that forces all media consumers to think).
- It empowers the nonbranded and uncredentialed.
- It trains kids better for the "real world" than traditional education does.
- It exposes truth as well as evil for people to find and take action for and against.
- It is the place where our children - natural information "hunter-gatherers" that they are, as MIT's Henry Jenkins puts it in his book Convergence Culture - can dig around endlessly for the information they crave, and it's the place where we can help them approach it critically and intelligently.
- It's necessarily bringing ethics back into the public discussion and citizenship back into public school curricula (I think, I hope).
- It subverts false authority and secret power.
Now I have to email all my friends and get them to weigh in!
3 comments:
Anne,
I'm impressed by your list, and you've clearly laid out the high ground. I'd add three for now...
thanks!
1) it allows us to communicate in a variety of ways/media and develop digital friendships with people who are discussing things that we are interested in all over the world [greater communication/community access- anytime/anywhere/anyway.]
2) it allows us to maintain and expand community connections begun in the physical world [supporting/expanding/maintaining physical world community.]
3) web2 seems much more "humanizing" than web1: text-only one way media have evolved to multi-media networks that show images and video of people and provoke 2 way communication [much more humanized, interactive web.]
Well, it allows for a much greater overlapping between what is usually referred to as "the real world" with the online reality.
We must not forget that MMO games are also part of the social web, and they are the ones who most effectively reinforce the idea of cooperation and working for a goal.
This overlapping will start inserting technology into people's lives in a much more seamlessly way, making the use of what is now a novelty into something more than normal - necessary. While this could be viewed as neither good nor bad, the fact is that mass-usage of something tends to perfect that same thing. So we'll see more features, more interaction, more difference from analogic media.
That in itself is an interesting point: that something that will grow to be fundamentally different from our analogic reality will (probably) be present in such a seamless way. Virtual worlds of today tend to emulate the real world (contrary to what common sense would dictate, it seems), but as the new generations become more and more accustomed to the Web 2.0 (which will eventually be Web x.0), they will develop and expand the characteristics of this soon-to-be Metaverse.
I just blogged about this: http://edtechpower.blogspot.com
I agree, as educators, we shouldn't just be doing this because we can.
I don't think any of this Web 2.0 "stuff" can take the place of face to face interaction. But it can add so much to our relationships with knowledge, with ideas and with each other.
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